Chapter Thirty-Nine #2
The shockwave slams into them, knocking them off balance, scrambling the Siphon’s grip without breaking bone or flesh. They stumble, groaning, disoriented.
Craize lands in front of me with a furious snarl, talons gouging deep into the soil. His wings snap open, unleashing a gale-force gust that scatters a cluster of enthralled wielders like leaves in a storm.
‘Left!’ he snaps through our bond.
I turn without thought.
My shoulder crashes into the chest of a man twice my size, driving him backwards into a tree hard enough to shake the canopy. The tenari shield catches a beam of stolen light midair and hurls it back with brutal precision.
It slams into his sternum.
He gasps as his body goes limp, the shadow bleeding out of his veins. His eyes clear, wide and panicked.
“What did I—” he starts.
“No time!” I shove him aside. “Fight or hide!”
The ultimatum snaps something awake in him.
His jaw tightens. He reaches down, snatching a twig from the ground—nothing more than brittle wood, snapped and useless.
For a heartbeat, it is nothing.
Then the air warps.
Power whispers through his fingers. The twig elongates, hardens, reshapes—fibres smoothing, edges sharpening—until a gleaming blade rests in his palm, flawless and deadly, unmistakably forged rather than carved.
A weapon born from will alone.
My breath catches.
A fellow Xoro.
He meets my eyes, nods once, and turns back toward the fight—new steel flashing as he charges.
“Don’t kill them.” I remind him, and he nods. “They just need to be shocked enough for the Siphon to loosen his grip.”
More of the entranced pour toward us, their movements jerky and wrong, limbs snapping with borrowed speed as their Gifts spark violently out of control.
Every clash is a gamble—every strike a risk—but each time I meet one head-on, redirecting a blow, slamming them to the ground, letting their stolen power recoil harmlessly back into them, something breaks.
They wake. They gasp. They cry out, terrified and disoriented, suddenly alive again.
One by one, the trance shatters.
But the tide doesn’t stop.
It just keeps coming.
A blur moves at my side.
River slips into step beside me, close enough that I feel the rush of air as he moves. A bandolier of knives crosses his chest, each blade dusted with shimmering blue powder that hums faintly as if eager for the throw.
He doesn’t say a word.
He doesn’t need to.
One knife leaves his hand—then another, then another—each thrown with effortless precision.
They carve through the air in clean, controlled arcs, guided by his Gift to graze rather than kill.
Just enough. It seems the closer the sun gets to us, the more of its power we can feel, no matter how weak it may be.
The powder detonates on contact in sharp flashes of blue, jolting the goo loose from its hold. Enthralled soldiers stumble mid-charge, weapons dropping as they blink in sudden clarity.
Before the blades can even kiss the ground, they whip back toward River, snapping neatly into his palms before sliding home along his strap like they were never gone.
He glances at me, breath barely uneven, a smug little smirk tugging at his mouth.
I bark a short laugh, adrenaline still screaming in my veins. “Show-off,” I breathe, and his smirk widens.
And together, we turn back toward the oncoming dark—ready for the next wave.
“Asha!” Craize snarls as a massive blast hurtles toward me. I raise the shield—too late—
Craize slams into me, shoving me aside as the attack tears through the air. He skids back, claws digging deep into the earth.
“I told you not to get killed!” I shout, pulling myself up from the ground.
‘And I told you to move faster,’ he retorts, shaking out his wings.
The Siphon’s army circles us again, dozens this time, eyes empty, powers glowing.
I tighten my grip on the shield, standing strong at Craize’s side.
“We have to wake them,” I say through my teeth.
Craize bares his fangs, eyes blazing like molten gold.
‘Then let us wake them all.’
“Go high,” I breathe to Craize, and in a heartbeat, he surges upward, wings slicing through the air. He hovers above me, a white blur against the fractured sky.
I summon light into my palms—bright, volatile, rippling with the gem’s power. The orbs thrum like living stars, eager and unrestrained. I hurl them upward, one after another.
Craize beats his wings once, hard, then again.
The gust catches the orbs and scatters them, sending them plummeting toward the ground like falling meteors. They burst against the earth in sharp flashes of gold and violet, the shockwaves rippling through the enthralled surrounding me.
Each impact jolts them—their eyes flickering, their bodies jerking as if something inside snaps free.
One drops to their knees, gasping. Another staggers backwards, clutching their head. A third blinks hard, confusion flooding their features as the trance shatters.
Craize sweeps overhead, circling, ready for my next command.
And for the first time since stepping into this chaos, the tide shifts.
We’re no longer surviving—we’re winning.
One by one, the enthralled snap back to themselves, and suddenly the battlefield tilts in our favour. We have more breathing with us than against us.
A shriek tears across the treetops, sharp enough to split the air. Then a glow flares in the distance—an ember so bright it swallows the forest canopy in molten orange.
The cage of fire.
Ryder’s done it. He’s trapped the Siphon.
Hope surges through me, fierce and as hot as the rising flames. I take a fast sweep of the battlefield—Ziek rallying newly freed fighters, Ciara healing with trembling hands, River a blur of blue-lit knives, Craize circling overhead like a winged guardian. They’re holding strong. We all are.
“Come on—we have to go,” I call, breathless but steady.
Craize swoops lower, wings kicking up dirt in a swirling gust. I leap onto his back, settling into the curve of his spine just as River vaults up behind me with practised ease.
Craize coils, muscles bunching.
And then we’re airborne—racing toward the fire, toward Ryder, toward the heart of everything that must end tonight.